y a vision within a vision, since the remembered dream of the Abyssinian maid is the cortex of the lost vision of the content of her song. (Did Wordsworth, perhaps, later recall these lines when he composed The Solitary Reaper?) If only, Coleridge laments, he could revive within him the damsel's lost symphony and song, if only he could recapture the whole of the original vision instead of just a portion of it, then he would build "in air" (i.e. find verbal music to express) the vision he had experienced -- and he would do so in such a way that witnesses would declare him to be divinely inspired and form a circle of worship around him. Such a reading of Kubla Khan, however, raises at least as many problems as it solves. What, for example, ought we to make of Kubla Khan and his enclosed garden? According to some accounts, Xanadu is Paradise Regained and Kubla symbolises the creative artist who gives concrete expression to the ideal forms of truth and beauty; according to other accounts, however, Kubla is a self-indulgent materialist, a daemonic figure, who imposes his tyrannical will upon the natural world and so produces a false paradise of contrived artifice cut off from the realm of natura naturans by man-made walls and towers.The images of the Abyssinian maid and the inspired poet in the closing section of the poem also present serious difficulties in interpretation. The problem is not so much that of the conjectured identification of these figures (though this is often attempted) as of the overall meaning and intention of the passage. Should we believe, as Humphry House and Irene Chayes have urged, that this final section must be read as a "positive statement of the potentialities of poetry" and a "prophecy of poetic triumph"? -- or is Edward Bostetter correct in asserting that "Kubla Khan is a symbolic expression of [Coleridge's] inability to realize his power as a poet . . . and the last lines are a quite explicit ...
